Recipes for metastable states in Spin Glasses

In this paper we develop a method introduced by one of us to study metastable states in spin glasses. We consider a `potential function' defined as the free energy of a system at a given temperature $T$ constrained to have a fixed overlap with a reference configuration of equilibrium at temperature $T'$. We apply the method to the spherical p-spin glass and to some generalization of this model in the range of temperatures between the dynamic and the static transition. The analysis suggests a correspondence among local minima of the potential and metastable states. This correspondence is confirmed studying the relaxation dynamics at temperature $T$ of a system starting from an initial configuration equilibrated at a different temperature $T'$.